"Open Innovation" is the word of the day as authors, PARC collaborators talk shop.

The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is known beyond Silicon Valley for its role developing products—Ethernet, WSYIWYG editors, laser printing. But mentions of those historic heights were kept at a minimum during this week's Power of 10 conference. The message of the day was clear with the first words to greet guests at the registration table (via both conference workers and a commemorative bookmark).

"Just wanted to let you know, 'Xerox PARC' is so 10 years ago. Today, we're 'PARC, a Xerox company.'"

PARC's Power of 10 is a year-long series of events, including public-friendly guest presentations and this half-day conference, to commemorate the company's first ten years of independent operation. In 2002 Xerox incorporated PARC as an independent, wholly owned subsidiary, shifting the R&D pioneers toward an open innovation business model that took center stage on Thursday.

Open innovation itself consists of companies finding ideas from both internal and external sources, then collaborating with others to implement them, theoretically sharing both risk and reward during the process. It's not a new practice by any means, but the terminology was coined soon after PARC's independence, with the book Open Innovation by Henry Chesbrough. He's the executive director of the Program in Open Innovation at UC Berkeley and happened to be the day's first keynote speaker.

Chesbrough coined the term "open innovation" and sees patent abuse today as a deterrent to the model.

Chesbrough applauded PARC's operative structure, calling it a much more connected means to innovation. To illustrate it, he compared the idea with a funnel. When a company operates with an internal focus, it limits what information comes in and channels it in one direction. But, "in open innovation, you drill holes in the funnel to let good ideas in, and out," he noted. The openness leads to more ideas, better ideas, and ideas that become reality more quickly. In open innovation, Chesbrough sees the lead company on a product operating as more of an orchestrator than creator.

"In a world with lots of useful info and good ideas, the companies that are going to win are the ones that put this together before others do," Chesbrough said. "You must orchestrate an ecosystem on behalf of your customers."

Chesbrough's point was best emphasized after his presentation. The rest of the afternoon featured panels with representatives from a few PARC-collaborators. They all shared their projects, but the most eye-catching were Nicole Tricoukes, Senior Maverick at Motorola Solutions, and Davor Sutija, CEO of Thin Film.

During the panel she was on, Tricoukes showcased a "deconstructed computer that you can wear on your head." Core technologies for the product started at PARC and the Kopin Corporation developed the whole package a bit further, now working with Motorola Solutions to potentially market the item. Tricoukes sees it as a way to bring computer access into the field with on-location industries like construction. "You become Iron Man or RoboCop, practically applying augmented reality to industry problems."

On a separate panel, Sutija said ThinFilm is in the business of printed electronics. The company is working towards creating a low-power, printable, rewritable memory that uses a non-toxic polymer and can be attached to virtually anything. "Your stuff will talk to you in three to five years," he said.

Like the Kopin and Motorola Solutions headset, ThinFilm's product is the culmination of multiple efforts. PARC built the logic, ThinFilm specialized in memory, another company created the display, the batteries are being developed in Berkeley. The initiative started by identifying a potentially growing consumer need for easily reproduced technology. "The 'Internet of Things' will involve hundreds of billions of items," Sutija offered.

After dreaming up ThinFilm's concept, it was then a matter of sharing that idea with others and determining where their expertise could fit in. Sutija believes that "printed electronics will be as disruptive as search was ten years ago," and while the company's products are still getting off the ground, ThinFilm would certainly not be what it is today without the benefit of an open innovation approach.

Amid all the positives being discussed with open innovation, the conference seldom touched upon the gray area of intellectual property, and how it factors into an open innovation business model. By allowing external companies to access your ideas (and vice-versa), how do you know what rightfully belongs to whom when a new product becomes an ecosystem of items that already existed? Can the bureaucracy involved potentially bring open innovation to a halt? During a Q&A with Chesbrough, this came up. But rather than seeing intellectual property as a deterrent to open innovation, Chesbrough believes it is beneficial to the practice. He believes it's simply being abused at the moment.

"Intellectual property is sand in the gears of open innovation," he said. "A certain amount is helpful—it promotes exchange and collaboration while ensuring everyone gets something. But more is not better, it's a pendulum. Today it's probably swung too far the other way. Businesses exist to purchase patents with no intent to use them."